Conventional systems and methods of licensing and/or identification of virtual network appliances deployed in a virtualized environment are known that can include delivering a software application or image for a respective virtual network appliance via specific physical media, and using a unique identifier associated with the specific physical media for licensing and/or identification of the respective virtual network appliance. For example, a software application or image for such a virtual network appliance can be physically delivered in a virtualized environment via a universal serial bus (USB) dongle, and a unique identifier associated with the USB dongle can then be used in the licensing and/or identification of the virtual network appliance. Such licensing can impose certain limitation(s) on the scope and/or duration of use of the virtual network appliance, possibly restricting or otherwise limiting an end-user's ability to assign, redistribute, and/or resell the virtual network appliance, and/or directing how, when, where, and/or for how long the end-user may use the virtual network appliance.
Such conventional systems and methods of licensing and/or identification of virtual network appliances deployed in a virtualized environment have drawbacks, however, in that the use of physical media (such as USB dongles) for delivering software applications or images for the virtual network appliances is generally unsuited for the licensing and/or identification of virtual network appliances deployed via electronic data transmission in certain virtualized environments, such as virtualized cloud-based data center environments and other virtualized cloud computing environments.